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Shabab Identify American as Bomber in Somalia Attack - NYTimes.com During high school, he sold sneakers out of his locker to make money to help support his family. He lifted weights, and his friends called him “Bullethead.” He was elected president of the school’s Somali Student Association, and he later became a caseworker at a prestigious law firm. At the University of Minnesota, he majored in chemistry and held a part-time job as a security guard at the management school there.
What's Missing from the Latest Census Income Calculations - Jobs & Economy - ... But don't start the party bus yet. Income is a broad measure which captures wages and salaries earned but also transfers, profits, interest payments, capital gains, rents and other forms of earnings. There are lots of resort destinations like Naples, Florida, for example, which have high incomes. This is because they attract people with wealth and incomes generated elsewhere. Wages more accurately reflect local earnings and productivity. To get at this, my colleague Charlotta Mellander examined the ratio of wages to income. Places with higher ratios import less income from elsewhere, depend less on transfers or rents, and generate more of their earnings and income locally.
Secret No More: Spy Satellite Designer Reveals Life's Work | KH-9 HEXAGON Spy... After achieving orbit, the KH-9 HEXAGON was commanded to begin its on-orbit checkout and calibration procedures. Phil Pressel's twin "optical bar" panoramic cameras began rotating, sweeping back and forth as the satellite flew over Earth, a process that intelligence officials later referred to as "mowing the lawn."
Asked for comment, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Weimin said it would be inappropriate to consider politics in making the selection.
"I think there are many artists in China who are competent to be candidates for the magazine. If this was done with political prejudice, it would be a violation of the purpose and principles of the magazine," Liu said.
He and Rebecca went back to her apartment and sat next to each other on her couch. There, they kissed for the first time since his injury.
“You know, I am missing my legs,” Dan joked. “Is that an issue?”
“I never dated a guy because he had nice knees,” Rebecca replied. “But I do like nice arms.”
Rebecca’s college roommate worried that Rebecca was mistaking empathy for romantic love and would find herself in a relationship that she could not end. “Who could break the heart of an Army officer who lost both his legs?” Sabrina recalled thinking.
Rebecca’s mother fretted as well. “I kept saying, ‘If you don’t think you would have wanted the person that Dan was before he got hurt, then you should really think about whether you want that sort of relationship now,’ ” Andrea Taber recalled.
The overall effect can be hypnotic, comic or exhilarating—often all at once. As with every media technology, to some degree the medium is the message. It's hard to be a downer over the human mic when your words are enthusiastically shouted back at you by hundreds of fellow occupiers, so speakers are usually pretty upbeat (or at least sound that way). Likewise, the human mic is not so good for getting across complex points about, say, how the Federal Reserve's practice of quantitative easing is inadequate to address the current shortage of global aggregate demand (although Joe Stiglitz valiantly tried on Sunday), so speakers tend to express their ideas in straightforward narrative or moral language.
There's something inherently pluralistic about the human mic too; it's almost impossible to demagogue, to interrupt and shout someone down or to hijack the General Assembly for your own sectarian purposes. That's clearly been a saving grace of this occupation, as the internecine fights over identity and ideology that usually characterize left formations haven't corrosively bubbled over into blood feuds there—yet. The human mic is also, of course, an egalitarian instrument, and it exudes solidarity over ego. No doubt, a great frenzy erupts when left gods like Michael Moore or Cornel West descend to speak, but many people only hear their words through the human mic, in the horizontal acoustics of the crowd instead of the electrified intimacy of "amplified sound." Celebrity, charisma, status, even public-speaking ability—they all just matter less over the human microphone.
But the greatest hidden virtue of the human mic has been the quality that almost every observer has reflexively lamented: it is slow. I mean incredibly, agonizingly, astonishingly slow; it can take over an hour for the General Assembly just to get through a nightly refresher course on group protocols before starting in on announcements, which precede debate about anything new, like whether or not the occupation should make a list of demands and if so, what those demands should be. Imagine collectively debating and writing the Port Huron Statement, by consensus, three to five words at a time.
Iran Warns of Facebook's Soft Power Characterizing the blogosphere as one of the "most effective elements of soft war" against Iran, Jafari said arrogant and imperial powers (meaning the United States) are using social-media sites to push their own values and agendas.
Living In The Stew: A DIY music scene goes small and goes home in Brooklyn | ... Even though the Brooklyn DIY scene’s innovative tactics for self-subsidizing space in a restrictive market breaks rank with much of the precedent set by punk’s past, the scene stills draws influence from a legacy established through thirty years of counter culture.The DIY culture, and the all ages movement which rose from it, began in the early 1980’s American punk and hardcore scene. These bands and audiences, primarily teenagers, were disregarded by the mainstream music industry, deemed incapable of producing anything commercially viable. If they wanted to keep producing art and music, their only choice was to do it themselves. And they did, creating touring routes across the country and dotting the American landscape with independent venues, press, and record labels, often in unconventional locations. Michael Azerrad, author of the definitive text on America’s DIY movement, Our Band Could Be Your Life, explains, “For musicians and audiences, DIY spaces are a way of separating their community and its culture from commerciality, making it more about the joy of getting together and having fun – which is exactly the right priority.”
TOKYO — Today on October 1st, both here in Tokyo and in Okinawa, the boryokudan haijojorei (暴力団排除条例) or organized crime exclusionary laws, go into effect, thus making all of Japan a lot less yakuza friendly; it’s the start of the Big Chill. The laws vary in the details, but they all criminalize sharing profits with the yakuza (aka the Japanese mafia) or paying them off.
In other words, if you pay protection money to the yakuza, or use them to facilitate your business affairs, you will be treated as a criminal. You may be warned once, but if you persist in doing business with the yakuza, you may have your name released to the public, be fined, imprisoned, or all of the above.
read these books!
[spreadsheet of books I've read since before 2006]
